Research · Forty Years, No Measurement (4 of 6)
California Chose to Regulate a Word
California did not reject manager licensure by accident or by calendar. It examined the question for three years, watched homeowner organizations oppose a mandatory industry-run standard, deleted the scheme, and enacted title protection instead. The interim measure is still the law.
The Only State That Decided On Purpose
Most of this series is about questions that were never answered — bills that died in committee, data that was destroyed, comparisons that were set up and never run.
California is different, and that is why it matters. California engaged the question directly, over multiple sessions, with a committee record. It reached a decision. And the decision was to regulate the title rather than the practice.
Understanding why is the most useful thing in this series for anyone who wants the field's competence question answered.
The First Attempt
A licensing bill, AB 1893, was introduced in 2000 and died when its vehicle was amended into an unrelated mortgage bill. Procedural, not substantive.
The Second Attempt, and What It Actually Proposed
Its successor, AB 555, passed the Assembly 56–17 in 2001. As it left the Assembly, the bill proposed mandatory registration with a private industry council, with unregistered practice a misdemeanor.
Read that construction carefully, because the details are the whole story. Not licensure by a state agency. Registration with a private body, made compulsory by statute, enforced by criminal penalty.
That design is not unusual in occupational regulation and it is often defensible — private bodies frequently hold the subject-matter expertise a state agency lacks, and delegating standard-setting to them can produce better standards more cheaply. It is also, structurally, the arrangement most likely to alarm the people the occupation serves.
The Customers Said No
Homeowner organizations opposed the bill. The Senate committee analysis records their objection, and it is worth quoting because it is the sentence the industry has never adequately answered.
Opponents argued the scheme would create, "as some argued, a monopoly-by-statute in an industry that already dominates consumers and homeowners," with standards "set forth by the industry - not the California education system or a government regulated entity."
The analysis further observes that "there did not appear to be any emergency necessitating the 'licensing' of managers."
Both halves of that opposition matter, and they are different objections.
The first is about who sets the standard. Homeowners were not persuaded that a standard written by the industry, made mandatory by the state, and enforced against practitioners would be written in the homeowners' interest.
The second is about whether a problem had been demonstrated. No emergency necessitating licensing. That is a committee telling an industry that it had not shown its work.
What Survived
The Senate deleted the registration scheme entirely and substituted title protection.
Under Business & Professions Code § 11505, it is an unfair business practice to use the title "certified common interest development manager" without at least 30 hours of prescribed coursework and an examination — or "to state or advertise that he or she is certified, registered, or licensed by a governmental agency to perform the functions of a certified common interest development manager."
Note what the statute does and does not do. It does not require anyone to be trained in order to manage a community association in California. It requires that a person claiming a particular title have done particular things. Anyone may do the work; not everyone may use the words.
Note also what the statute does not contain: it names no private organization. The Senate's response to a mandatory private registry was to write a standard that belongs to nobody in particular.
The Interim Measure That Never Ended
The scheme was enacted in 2002 as an interim measure. It survived its sunset. Its repeal date was deleted in 2018.
It is the law today, in the largest common interest community market in the United States, twenty-four years after it was adopted as a placeholder.
That is worth stating plainly because of how often "interim" solutions are treated as waypoints in industry discussion. This one is the destination, and has been for two decades.
The Lesson, Stated Precisely
The episode's lesson for this research is narrow and hard:
With no measured evidence on the table, a mandatory industry-run standard could not win the confidence of the industry's own customers — and what survived was regulation of a word.
This is not a story about homeowner groups being unreasonable. Their objection was the correct objection given the information available. If a field proposes that the state compel practitioners to hold its credential, and cannot demonstrate that holding the credential produces better outcomes for the people served, then "monopoly-by-statute" is a fair characterization of what is actually on the table, whatever the proponents' intentions.
The industry had, and has, the sincere professional conviction that its education improves practice. What it did not have — in 2001, and still does not have in 2026 — is a study.
A study would not have guaranteed passage. Legislatures decline well-evidenced proposals constantly. But it would have changed the shape of the hearing. The committee would have had to engage a finding rather than weigh two assertions, and "no emergency necessitating licensing" is a much harder line to write when someone has put a measured harm rate in front of you.
Why This Is the Most Actionable Part of the Series
Colorado shows what happens when nobody instruments an experiment. New Jersey shows what happens when nobody has to explain a silence.
California shows the audience the field has actually been failing to persuade, and it is not the legislature.
It is the homeowners. The customers. The people whose assessments pay for the management, whose communities bear the consequences of competence or its absence, and who were the decisive voice in the biggest market in the country.
Every measurement item on this field's research agenda — the licensed-versus-unlicensed comparison, the credential variable on satisfaction surveys, a published turnover rate — is ultimately addressed to that audience. Not to a committee chair. To an owner at a Tuesday night meeting deciding whether the credential after the manager's name means anything.
Right now the honest answer to that owner is: it might, and nobody has checked. That answer has cost this field twenty-four years in California alone.
What a Board Can Do About It Now
A board does not have to wait for the field to run the study to build the evidence for its own community. What outcomes to record, over what period, and with what limits stated, is the subject of CICSC's competence measurement standard. It exists precisely because the institutions have not measured, and the only competence file currently in existence is the one each association and each professional chooses to keep.
Related CIC-SC Resources
- Governance Standard EDU-001 — Manager Competence Measurement
- The Industry Asked to Be Regulated — and the Legislatures Said No (Part 1)
- The Only Experiment America Ever Ran: Colorado, 2015–2019 (Part 2)
- Texas Has Never Introduced the Bill at All (Part 5)
A Note on Sources
Vote counts, committee analysis language, and statutory text are drawn from the California Legislature's records for AB 1893 and AB 555 and from Business & Professions Code § 11505, as retrieved and cited in the working paper Forty Years, No Measurement. Readers relying on any statute for any purpose should consult the current text directly and take its application from counsel.
CICSC provides educational resources and governance standards. CICSC does not provide legal, accounting, tax, engineering, insurance, or reserve study services. Boards should consult qualified professionals for matters requiring professional judgment.